I see... maybe I try the 2D graphic export.....

All great tips. Thanks loads.

Okay, so the problem is the number of plugins. What happens, inside SU, when there are too many plugins, that causes the loss of functions? I certainly don't need to know the technical answer to that, but the Google software engineers should know. And if they do, is there some insurmountable reason why they can't fix it?

Have a look at this topic over th help forums: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/sketchup/thread?tid=6c575f696884e0af&hl=en It seems that if you sign up for the trial of IES VE-WARE, you get a promo code worth $ 100. It's an old thread but someone posted that it still worked yesterday.

[%(#BF0000)[Drawingelement.material]](http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/drawingelement.html#material) = nil For example: face = Sketchup.active_model.selection[0] face.material = nil face.back_material = nil ( Side note: If you wanted to remove only the color from a texture (when a texture is colorized), it seems not to work with material.color = nil, but turns it black )

In entity info, SketchUp shows only a checkbox "cast shadows" but not "receive shadows" (both are available for other drawing elements). It seems impossible (except of turning edges off).

Hi Here is another WIP code this time wrapped up as a plugin. Still it works only for groups. Running: Select entities first, then use menu Plugins/SPP to execute plugin, click with a left mouse button on a screen. Observe status balk messages. How it works: Plugin works in 4 steps. It will search for all groups in a selection and make every group unique In every group it searches for a biggest face, and then rotates whole group so normal vector of biggest face is pointed up (0,0,1) Then the angle between X axis and main centroidal axis of this face is found, and group is rotated one more time, to match orientation along X axis. Last step is placing oriented groups along Y axis, with a separation between groups ( bounding boxes ) of 1 inch. ( to change it look for separation=1 in a script and change it there, I will code another way to do it later). Calculation based on : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_area#Area_and_centroid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_moment_of_area#Any_cross_section_defined_as_polygon Therefore it works nicely for a faces without inner holes. For a faces with holes it gives a slight incorrect result in step 3. This plugin is a part of a bigger toolset that I am making to use Sketchup for making paper models ( SPP stands for Sketchup-Paper-Planes), more will surface in a near future. Greets Matt Groups to XY plane

Polylines are NOT a SUp entity. You can 'Weld' some lines into curves and retry the export... BUT, if it's not a continuous 'curve' in the SKP it ain't going t become one in the DWG!

that was my reaction exactly... john BTW. The Mondrianum picker is great... works in SU with 'coverflow' in materials box...

In addition to right clicking to update a component, you can also save a component to its own sketchup file. You can then have multiple versions of this component and load in the one you want. It also allows multiple people to work on a project at the same time. You can flip a component along its x, y or z axis to accomplish a mirror.

@d12dozr said: Awesome. Welcome to the age of digital fabrication! Ty

@mac1 said: tet42740 Some additional info for you: I used MeshLab and and did a quadratic edge collapse decimation and was able to reduces the edges in the model by ~200,000. However Meshlab is not easy to use and looking at the model more it became apparent the basic tile model has some problems. There are a number of edges which IMO should not be there. There are some specific mathmatical relations required if you attempt to model it using the ARC tool and very small errors can cause the problems you see in that model. If you want to correct ,create a cylinder( The OD I measured was 96.453 mm, make it just a zero thickness ( no wall thickness) I'll explain why below, extrude it up to the 250mm ht, select the top and scale down by the ratio to get the small dia you want ( I measuerd 71.190 mm for that). You can then go ahead and use the off set tool to set the 15mm thickness. The reason for waiting to this step is the scale tool will scale the thickness if you do it early. I then used the section tool to cut the truncated cylinder at one of the edges lines, make the section a group , intersect with model and delete the undesired portion. When I replaced this new tile with the ones in my posted model, which was based on what was in your orginial OP, the number of model edges reduced >= 200,000. Just some thoughts for you Sorry, I was... delayed. :gandalf: Thanks a lot, I clearly understood. I must change the way I work. I've used many industrial modelers for my job (Catia, Euclid, ... : oldies : ) and it's no good with softs like Sketchup or Blender. Cheers.

ArcGIS creates the model in the kml file, not a separate collada file (I think). If that is the case, try this plugin: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=38009

Not upgrading is a wise choice. there is a list of known issues but I have submitted a couple that are not on that list (crashes when exporting to fbx for example). http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/sketchup/thread?tid=09d5a01c3e4845cf&hl=en

Gaieus, Thank you for your reply and advise. A few mm either way shouldn't be a problem if this makes thing easier to model. Brian

A kind of "structural glass" ("vetro strutturale" in italian) maybe?

I have not tried yet, but the plugin http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=41441 (by Aerilius) seems to solve this problem?! Cotty

Thanks. I've been looking for months for just that one line of code. Now rendering sketchyphysics with v-ray is one step closer.